Thursday, October 29, 2015

As the 2016 presidential race heats up, watch for the death penalty to be a non-starter issue. As with the 2008 and 2012 elections (and pretty much every election since 1988), at the presidential level, the topic is still a third-rail, "don't stir up images of Dukakis," weak on crime, kind of issue.

Asked her position on
capital punishment, Mrs. Clinton said she did not support abolishing the
death penalty, but she did encourage the federal government to rethink
it.

“We have a lot of
evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied, and
too often in a discriminatory way,” she said. “So I think we have to
take a hard look at it.”

Mrs. Clinton added, “I
do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are
certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the
death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as
opposed to what we’ve seen in most states.”

Her statement
immediately ignited an outcry from some liberals who hoped she would
have taken a tougher stance against the death penalty. Mrs. Clinton’s
two main Democratic rivals, Senator Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley,
have called to abolish the death penalty.

Mrs. Clinton expressed
support for the death penalty when she ran for the Senate in 2000. Her
husband, Bill, expanded the use of capital punishment as president by
signing the 1994 federal crime bill, parts of which Mrs. Clinton denounced this spring
in the first major policy speech of her 2016 campaign. In that speech,
she called for an end to the era of mass incarceration and for improved
relations between African-Americans and mostly white police forces, but
she did not wade deeply into the death penalty.

Until Wednesday, the
topic had not come up in the Democratic contest, but botched attempts at
lethal injection in several states have put the issue back in the
spotlight. Mrs. Clinton recently campaigned in Florida, Texas and
Virginia, three of the top states in executions since 1976.

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